


Whumptober 2020 17 I Did Not See That Coming

by frankie_mcstein



Series: Whumptober 2020 [17]
Category: Magnum P.I. (TV 2018)
Genre: Again, Fluffy Ending, Gen, Not a death fic, Whumptober 2020, car crashes, hurt magnum, incorrect assumption of character death, ohana is life, protective Magnum
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:13:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27063214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frankie_mcstein/pseuds/frankie_mcstein
Summary: Whumptober 2020 prompt 17- I Did Not See That ComingEverything tensed up as he remembered Higgins had been in the car with him
Relationships: Juliet Higgins & Thomas Sullivan Magnum IV
Series: Whumptober 2020 [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947172
Comments: 18
Kudos: 56





	Whumptober 2020 17 I Did Not See That Coming

**Author's Note:**

> Spoiler alert only not really- this is not a death fic. I don't write them or read them. Anyone who knows me knows that but this reads like one, a few times over in fact. And the last thing I want is for someone to get upset and click away without realising that I don't kill my darlings.  
> This plays heavily off of 1.16, where Magnum is told to imagine what will happen if he gets t-boned, Higgins is in the passenger seat, and the airbag doesn't work.

Even the birds weren't chirping. The car had made so much noise as it rolled down the hill that it had frightened most of them away. The ones that had been too scared to move were watching this brightly coloured interloper with all the caution they would usually reserve for a predator, anxious to see what it would do next. 

One little bird, dark plumage still fluffed up in defense, gave a small, high-pitched chirrup.

The car, looking awkward as it lay stranded on its side, gave an answering groan, a creak of tortured metal as something shifted.

The little bird fled, as did the other birds, survival instinct overriding any thought of freezing or even curiosity. Whatever this red intruder was, they weren't about to try to drive it out. It had claimed this part of their forest for its own.

...

Awareness was slow to come back. Everything was blurry, and trying to focus made his head spin and the world lurch around him.

_ 'Figure out what happened,'  _ he told himself.  _ 'Then figure out what you need to do.' _

The deep breath he took made his chest burn and a flash of pain jump into his side from his stomach. Shallow breaths it was, then, at least for the foreseeable future. Now if he could only get the world to stop shaking, he'd be on a roll.

_ 'Where are you, and what do you need?' _ Even his mental voice sounded confused.

_ 'Injuries,'  _ he decided.  _ 'Check for injuries.' _ So he flexed his fingers and felt them clench around something cold and smooth. Okay, whatever he'd been doing, it'd involved holding something. That… wasn't at all helpful. He twitched his toes, feeling them press against the tops of his shoes, before shifting his ankles. Oh, okay, there was something beneath his feet too. A quick, cautious tensing of his knees and he felt whatever was beneath his feet shift slightly. It felt familiar somehow, like he had done it a million times before. 

_ 'Car!'  _ his mind yelled suddenly, and everything clicked. He'd been driving; that was right. The road was clear, he'd opened her up a little, still within the speed limit but skirting the very edge of speeding. And then… what then? He closed his eyes- he still couldn't see straight anyway- and tried to force his memory to behave.

A clear road. The purr of the engine. And then a scream as the wheel tore itself out of his hands. The vibration of an impact that had made his entire body jump and throb in response. Sickening views twisting in front of him as the car spun and lurched. Pain in his shoulders as he fought desperately to keep some measure of control over the car while it shook and whined. Weightlessness as the wheels left the tarmac and the entire…

A scream? 

He felt his body tense, cuts and bruises and who knew what other injuries and complaining as a surge of adrenaline rushed through him. But why? What was it that was making him tense? The memory of his own scream? That didn't seem right. His car had been crashing, he was leaving the road, he was allowed to scream. Or yell. Or swear.

It just didn't seem right. A scream. Did he scream? He wasn't really the screaming type. Even if he had, so what? Why did it matter? Why was his mind focusing on the noise? Something important, something he was missing; he knew it. He just couldn't think of what it was. His stomach was churning, anxiety making his heart pound and his gut roll.

_ 'Okay, you need to focus.'  _ And his mental voice was starting to sound a little like a drill sergeant now as he started to lose patience with himself.  _ 'You were driving. You crashed. Higgins…' _

Magnum's eyes flew open, and his head whipped to the side; pain and nausea be damned. Higgins had been in the car! And, since she had screamed as they went off the road so long ago, he hadn't heard her make a single sound. His eyes were still struggling to focus, everything in his line of sight still shaking and wobbling, but he stared hard at the figure slumped in the passenger seat until the blurry colors finally coalesced into Higgins.

Blood had stained her blonde hair and pale skin, streaks of rusty red marring both. A bruise, livid purple, was already forming on the cheek he could see. Her right arm looked like it was pinned between her head and the top of the door, the hand and nails looking bloodless and white. But, as his eyes stopped jumping over her and finally managed to settle on one thing, her eyes chased every other image, every other thought, out of his head. Her brown eyes that could spit fire and throw ice when she was annoyed, that could look daggers when she was angry, that could be so soft, were wide open. Unblinking. Unseeing.

He stared at her cold, dead eyes, willing her to blink, to breathe. Seconds crawled by, his heart squeezing against itself as he waited for a sign of life. A sign that didn't come.

…

"He was calling your name again." Rick immediately regretted telling Higgins that as he took in the stricken look on her face.

Two full days since the Ferrari had been run off the road, and Magnum still hadn't woken up. He'd roused himself enough to call out to her a few times, crying her name in a voice that was nothing like his usual tone, full of despair and fear. But, every time, he slumped back to the bed again.

The first time it had happened, T.C. had gone tearing through the corridors of the hospital, thinking Magnum was on the verge of driving himself into a panic attack. By the time he and Higgins had run from the small coffee shop to his room, Magnum was unconscious again. A shaken-looking Rick had explained to them what had happened, how Magnum had sobbed just once before abruptly dropping back to the pillows, all semblance of wakefulness vanishing in a moment.

It kept happening, and every time it was the same. Higgins had tried to refuse to leave the room in the hope that he would register her voice and wake up properly, arguing with his doctor and threatening to involve both the press and the law. It didn’t make any difference. She had been there the next time Magnum had called for her and had tried to talk to him, begging him to wake up. But it hadn’t helped. No matter who was with him or what they tried, Magnum would call out to Higgins, cry a denial of some kind, then drop back into deep unconsciousness.

…

Awareness was slow to come back. Everything was blurry, and trying to focus made his head spin and the world lurch around him. He bit back a groan, unsure if he was involved in an active fire situation, if making a noise might give away his location.

Only… that didn’t seem right. He wasn’t on active duty anymore, not since they’d escaped from the POW camp. Ah, right! He wasn’t in the camp either. The image of a beach floated through his mind. Right, Oahu. Nuzo’s crazy idea had paid off and they had all settled on Oahu.

So why was he in so much pain?

_ ‘Obviously something bad happened,’ _ he told himself, his mental voice sounding a little annoyed.  _ ‘Something went wrong, and you’re in a jam.' _

He took some time to just breathe, feeling a slight twinge in his chest, but nothing he couldn’t ignore. He opened his eyes, not too sure when he had closed them, and tried to force his vision to clear. Everything looked off, like it was moving, shifting around him, and his eyes couldn’t seem to bring anything into focus.

It was the noise that made it all click. A quiet whispering noise that was just loud enough to be annoying. His ears kept focusing on it even though he was trying to listen for voices or approaching vehicles- he had been in a car, that much he could finally remember- hoping that he was still near enough to the road to be spotted by someone passing by.

_ ‘It’s the wind,’ _ his mind told him finally, sounding amused that he hadn’t figured it out on his own. He didn’t really think that was fair, but his eyes suddenly got the memo.

_ ‘Leaves,’  _ he heard in his head, and the blurry, shifting picture in front of him abruptly became the branches of a tree, moving in the wind. His head was tilted back, eyes looking upward, and his neck started to ache the moment he realized it was stretched out. But some instinct told him that moving his head would be a very particular type of stupid, and he ignored the protesting muscles.

_ ‘You’re forgetting something.’ _ Now his mental voice sounded smug, and he groaned as it went on.  _ ‘You haven’t checked yourself for injuries. Or looked to see if you took out another car when you went off the road.’  _ There was a pause in his train of thought.

His entire body tensed. He knew there was something else, something he should be thinking about. Something vitally important. He waited, barely breathing, for his mind to come back to him and tell him the important thing. But it wasn’t his mental voice he heard. It was higher, quieter, and sounded heart-breakingly vulnerable.

“You haven’t even built a fire yet.”

He felt his lips twitch into a smile at the memory. Sure, he had been exhausted and beyond worried, but her unquestioning faith in him, the way she hadn’t asked if he could build a fire but just assumed it was a thing he could do, always made him feel a little like grinning. And then he realized what it meant, why the memory had popped into his head, and the smile dropped from his lips, the color drained from his face, leaving him feeling light-headed, frozen. Higgins had been in the car.

She had been in the car, and he had forgotten.

She had been in the car and hadn’t made a sound since he woke up.

He didn’t want to look. He turned his head so slowly, knowing what he was going to see, not wanting to confirm his gut-wrenching suspicion. If he didn’t look, some small, scared part of his mind whispered, then maybe it wouldn’t be true. But he was no coward. His head kept moving despite his heart begging it to stop. And Higgins came into view.

She looked almost peaceful, eyes closed, lips parted, like she had just dozed off in the passenger seat. He blinked, looked down to the branch that had been forced into her stomach by the crash, and let his eyes flick back up to her face. A yell was building in his throat as the pain of losing her rolled through his stomach, and he didn’t have the strength to keep it from escaping.

…

“It’s all right, Thomas.” Higgins sounded frantic, and T.C.’s stomach dropped to hear her.

He sped up, hot coffee sloshing over the rim of the cups he was carrying. He didn’t even notice, just dropped the cups in the bin as he practically ran through the door to Magnum’s room.

“Just open your eyes, please. I’m right here.”

“Juliet!” Magnum was crying, tears on his cheeks as he reached for whatever image of Higgins his mind was torturing him with. “No! Ple… please no.” And just like that, just like all the other times, he dropped back against his pillows, his body relaxing with all the rudeness of a puppet whose strings had been slashed. 

Higgins turned away from the bed with a shake of her head and a frustrated “urgh!” escaping her. T.C. managed to catch her hand before she could drive her fist into the wall. She spun to look at him, and the helplessness in her eyes was heartbreaking.

“I know,” he whispered, taking advantage of the grip he had on her wrist to pull her into a hug. “I know.” And she gave just one sniffle before burying her face in his chest.

Seeing Magnum, the man who always had an answer or a plan, the man who was so strong, reduced to begging for a specter to leave him alone was almost more than any of them could handle. None of them were eating or sleeping properly; none of them were willing to leave him for long. Even Katsumoto, while still insisting weakly that he didn’t care at all for any of them, was running himself ragged trying to hunt down whoever had driven into the Ferrari and left Magnum suffering from such horrific head injuries.

“He’ll wake up,” T.C. muttered in the vague direction of Higgins’ hair. Part of him was actually glad she had finally expressed some sort of emotion, let go of some of the fear he had seen her trying to hide. “He isn’t about to leave us, Higgy Baby. Not Tommy.”

He noticed Rick slipping in through the door and gave him a small smile and nod. She’s okay, the nod said, don’t worry. And Rick nodded in return before leaving the room again, doubtless off to find something hot to drink to go with the sandwiches he had quietly put on the small table.

…

Awareness was slow to come back. Everything was blurry, and trying to focus made his head spin and the world lurch around him.

He had the feeling of a vague sort of sense of panic as he realized he didn't know where he was or what had happened. But it was a quiet little hum in the back of his mind, hardly even enough to feel at all. He thought he should probably be curious about that, but the thought was slow to form and even his curiosity was a distant sort of thing. 

There was something between him and his thoughts and feelings. Something… soft? He was sure the dull sort of feeling was due to some sort of painkiller; he'd had more than enough experience to recognize that, no matter how out of it he was. But why was he on painkillers? What had happened? Where was he?

He tried to think carefully, or, rather, as carefully as he could when his thoughts were made concrete wrapped in cotton wool. Was it a training accident? An ambush? Had the guards done something? 

He knew his thoughts were flickering about and couldn't figure out how to stop them. Maybe the quarterback who'd always hated him had jumped him again? Maybe he'd been shot? Could he have crashed the car again?

That rang something they chased away a little of the fog. He'd been driving. He'd been on his way back to the estate, pictures of a cheating spouse safe on his camera's memory card. He was meant to be… doing something. He was meant to be… handing the card off to Higgins; that was it. 

At the thought of Higgins something else seemed to filter into his brain. He was… worried? Worried about Higgins? That felt right. Why was he worried about her? She had been safe and sound at the estate all day. He could feel himself starting to get annoyed. He needed to know what had happened to him and why he was feeling like he needed to keep Higgins safe.

“Thomas?”

Hey now, that was good timing! The woman herself, at least, if he could trust his ears. He didn’t know anyone else who sounded like that. He focused on his eyes, on getting the lids to lift just a little.

“Hey, that’s it. Open your eyes and look at me.”

_ ‘I’m trying, Higgy,’ _ he thought.  _ ‘Gimme a minute here.’ _ It only actually took a few more seconds, something in her voice spurring him on to force his eyelids to peel themselves upward. The look on her face as she finally swam into view was sheer, mind-numbing relief.

“Finally,” she breathed.

He thought he could feel her hand on his face and tilted his head a little, finding he quite liked the feeling. Sure enough, gentle fingers were rubbing lightly over his cheek, and he let his eyes close again. She was obviously okay. And he had seen enough to know that he was in a hospital room. He figured he deserved to give in to the sleep he could feel tugging at his awareness.

It wasn’t until he was more than half asleep that his mind whispered to him that the airbag hadn’t inflated. But by then it was too late for him to do anything with the thought.

…

“You’re kidding me!” Higgins’ voice was louder than she’d intended and she looked away for a split-second as Magnum winced. “Sorry,” and she was practically whispering.

“S’okay,” Magnum accepted her apology without even a blink; even he had to admit it sounded odd.

“You spent days dreaming I was dead because the passenger airbag didn’t deploy?”

“Technically, I think it was the head injury that made him spend days unconscious,” T.C. offered, glad when he noticed Magnum manage a small smirk. “It was just bad luck that he noticed the airbag before he blacked out.”

“Way to obsess, Tommy,” Rick chimed in, relief over his brother finally being on the road to recovery making his sarcasm weaker than usual. 

Magnum opened his mouth to say something, probably in his defense, but he was interrupted by a mildly frustrated-sounding Katsumoto.

“This is fascinating, but I’m trying to take a statement,” he said drily, pencil still poised over his notebook.

“Sorry,” was muttered by the other four people in the room.

“I didn’t even see it coming,” Magnum told him, picking up where he had left off. “I heard an engine and thought it sounded like they were pushing it, then the wheel was ripped out of my hands and I was heading for the side of the road.” He shifted slightly on the bed, noticing when everyone else shifted forward a little as if ready to lend a hand. Even Katsumoto, who quickly tried to cover the movement by scratching his knee, reacted instantly. 

“And you can’t think of who you’ve annoyed lately?” the detective pushed, settling back in his chair. “No one who issued any threats?”

Magnum tried to shake the image of Rudy Wong from his head, tried not to hear the words, 'I mean, you could still get t-boned. Imagine the airbag was disabled and Higgins is sitting in the passenger seat.' After seeing her dead, over and over again, it was hard to get the words out of his head.

“No. I uh… I can’t think of anything that would matter now.”

Katsumoto looked to Higgins, but she just shrugged at the unspoken question.

"Unfortunately things have been rather quiet lately; no threats or unsatisfied clients to speak of."

Katsumoto sighed and flipped his notebook closed. "If any of you think of anything that might be useful, call me straight away." He saw Magnum open his mouth and cut off whatever joke the other man was planning on making with a quick, "I won't have people using cars as lethal weapons on my island." He very deliberately ignored the way everyone's faces made it obvious no one in the room believed that was his only concern and stood.

"I'll keep in touch." And with that he walked out, not waiting for anyone to say goodbye. 

There was a comfortable silence for a few seconds as everyone took the opportunity to simply relax. Then Magnum sighed, his face clouding over.

"Are you in pain?" Higgins, closest to the call button, stretched out her hand, but Magnum shook his head.

"I'm sure it was just a fluke that the airbag didn't deploy, but… I can't stop thinking about it."

Higgins seemed about to argue but Rick didn't give her a chance.

"You think Jules might have been the target?"

"Don't worry about it, Thomas. We'll keep an eye on our girl." T.C. wasn't at all impressed by the unamused look Higgins threw him, raising his eyebrows at her in response. 

It took a second, but she finally nodded. "Right. I don't believe I'm in danger, but I'll stick close until we figure out what really happened."

It was enough. Magnum was still exhausted, still on heavy duty painkillers, and worrying that his subconscious had been warning him about a threat to Higgins had been the only thing keeping him awake. He let his eyes close to the sound of Rick offering to sleep outside Higgins' bedroom door, a tiny smile tugging at his lips before he fell deeply asleep.

In his dream, he was driving along the coast of the island, Higgins in the passenger seat. It was a beautiful day, he could just make out T.C.'s helicopter off in the distance, and Higgins was laughing helplessly at something he had just said. In reality, the smile that had started just before he drifted off was still there, growing slightly as he dreamed the sound of Higgins' laughter.

  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Poor Tommy. He just wants to keep his Higgy safe.


End file.
